By Siobhan O’Leary

German startup PaperC, a virtual academic bookstore/library founded by Berlin students for students, has announced that it has signed on Elsevier as a new publishing partner. With this agreement, PaperC will become the first platform to sell individual pages from books published by the leading STM publisher.

The deal with Elsevier expands PaperC’s client list to more than 85 publishing partners. Elsevier will contribute 180 titles to PaperC’s current selection of 13,500 e-books. “This is a big day for PaperC”, said Martin Fröhlich, CEO of PaperC, in a statement released by the company. “Elsevier is a major player in the market sector we are currently developing and shaping. The collaboration with Elsevier will also improve our ability to work with our target audience.” PaperC, which was founded in 2009, offers users the option of reading each individual book free of charge for 30 minutes, as well as the possibility to purchase individual pages, chapters or entire e-books.

According to PaperC, this is the first time Elsevier will make its titles available for purchase by page or chapter.

Tom Rosenthall, Elsevier’s senior manager for sales and electronic products, explained that this collaboration represents an important step for the publishing house, noting that PaperC’s services allow users “to pay only for the information they really need.”

The Elsevier titles that will be made available to PaperC come from the Morgan Kaufmann, Digital Press and Elsevier Science imprints and cover topics ranging from artificial intelligence, computer networks and game development to information solutions for the design, installation and maintenance of “enterprise implementations”.